Hedda Schupak

Personal Views on the Jewelry Industry: Tell us Your Thoughts
October 31, 2006

In Hyde Park, London, there is a famous spot called Speaker’s Corner, where, on Sundays, anyone is welcome to climb onto a podium box and deliver his or her opinions about anything. Of course, the audience—if there is one—is equally free to argue back. I daresay a few may even have lobbed a tomato or two over the years.

Blogging is essentially Speaker’s Corner with a global reach. Rather than delivering a soliloquy to a small audience, anyone with a mouse and an Internet connection can now broadcast his or her views to the world at large—and anyone with the ability to read can argue back.

The advantage of blogs (short for “weblog”) is the ability to connect with people anywhere in the world. Indeed, that’s the gift of the Web in general. For all that jewelers fear competition from the Internet, and psychologists fear that virtual conversation breeds isolation, the Internet also creates a sense of community and fosters interaction across boundaries. (And, from a Shopping Goddess’s perspective, it does allow intrepid consumers like me to locate seemingly obscure items with relative ease.)

But for you, the retailer, the Internet doesn’t have to be an adversary. It can also be your business partner. No longer do you have to wait till a show or convention to ask your peers for advice or suggestions. And given the passions of this industry, more often than not our readers have strong opinions about the articles we write in JCK.

So if you find yourself either clapping along when we write something you agree with—or wanting to give us a good resounding slap upside the head when we don’t—now you can. Just click on the tab called “TalkBack,” type in your thoughts, follow the easy prompts to post them, and your response becomes part of the jewelry community dialogue on the subject. It’s an open forum to say what you really think—we won’t edit you, though we might argue back, just like the box at Speaker’s Corner. (We do reserve the right to monitor blogs on JCKonline.com for potentially slanderous and/or obscene language.)

The JCK Voices blog is also a chance to hear what our editors really think. In our reporting—whether online or in print—we’re both dedicated and obligated to be balanced and objective, but being human and we do occasionally (!) have opinions about what we write. Because the JCK Voices blog is an opinion blog, we can use our expertise to offer our own personal views about a subject that wouldn’t normally appear in our reporting.

Leading off JCK Voices will be Rob Bates, our senior diamond editor, who recently returned from Sierra Leone, where he witnessed firsthand what that country is like in the wake of conflict diamonds. Rob will be discussing that and more diamond news and views in his entries. Other JCK staff editors soon will be stepping up to the box to share their views on a variety of controversial topics.

It’s just like the box at Hyde Park Corner, minus the jetlag and the flying tomatoes.

Posted by Hedda Schupak on October 31, 2006 | Comments (1)